Once again, the religious rightwing bigots hired by the GOP to run our government sneak around destroying science and technology. Just like illiterate press officers who were dropouts ordered NASA scientists around, so some faceless ignoramus has sneakily deleted all mention of evolutionary science listings for government educational grants.

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: August 24, 2006
Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students.

The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.”

Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing.

A blank space was left where the deletions occured. Obviously, someone decided to remove all mention of these fields of study. Investigating who this was and arresting them for destruction of Federal property should be a high priority with the FBI. After they catch the anthrax killer.

Like termites eating the heart of the wood in a house, the house looks sound but it is fragile and about to collapse, these reprobates work tirelessly within, their sole aim is to destroy the foundations of science and turn back the clock. When Christianity arose, science died. In the Roman Empire, the need to believe in Jesus magic trumped scientific thinking. Relentlessly, the early Christians killed, literally, anyone who was a philospher who thought 'scientifically'. If Islam hadn't come along and saved the day, we would have lost all the great work of the Greek enlightenment! They rescued the last few books in Africa that weren't burned or written over by the Christian fabulists. Just recently, scientists discovered a great Greek scientific text covered over with fairy tales. Using sophisticated tools, we are able to read the original text. This sort of vandalism was encouraged by the Church.

Today, the GOP is filled with people who practice black magic parading as Christians. They kiss skulls, use magic numbers, have pretend sacrifices in front of giant owl statues, etc. Then there are the Christo-magicians who pray for the Apocalypse and pretend the world was created in a single, magical gesture. And that all science is lies and the truth is a phony, baby story written thousands of years ago by credulous sheep herders who blundered into the City of Ur where Zog, the Pegasus incarnation at that time, lived.

I just had to toss that in. Heh.

Anyway, a document pressed in clay and then lost and carried around by sheep herders verbally, morphing and changing over the years, then the descendants of the sheep people are carried off to Babylon where they hear the same old story from ancient Ur a thousand years earlier, only better clad with fabulous details, this was written down and kept as a religious document.

It has zero to do with science. To make the Bible magician's world match reality, the Bible worshippers want to turn science into magic and then proceed with the program of creating the Apocalypse because they stupidly have convinced themselves that Jesus will give them a new planet magically if we destory this one!

This insane idea is very stubborn and is impacting on our foreign policy, our diplomacy, our economic system, our ability to live on this planet since these same ignorant magic worshipping fools are determined to drag us all back to Ur, the beginning, with us living in a copper-age/stone age culture and I suppose then we will revive the lightning bolt throwing horse god which will please him a lot, I assure you.

International tests show that socialist Finland is outstanding, they have an interesting school system and philosophy. They are leaving Germany and France in the dust. Asia, across the board, does better than nearly all of Europe and don't even ask where America is in this race. Dumpty dumpty dump. Waddling along.

Europe is falling behind Asia in terms of education and skills, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It blames France and Germany which are criticised for mediocre education systems and their inherent class bias.

China and India, on the other hand, are starting to deliver "high skills at low costs and at an ever increasing pace".

South Korea and Finland are highlighted as positive examples where investment in education has taken priority.

I decided to look at the previous BBC Finland stories. From the BBC:Ms Haatainen, a minister in a centre-left coalition government, says that this economic imperative is best served by having a broad-based, open-access education system.

And in particular, she says the country's educational success can be attributed to the "unified" school system, which sees children staying at the same school between the ages of seven and 16, rather than having primary and secondary schools.YES! And it works! I have, over the years, adovcated just that. I founded "Save Our Schools" in Brooklyn back in the seventies and battled the school board every day. Virtually nothing changed! Worse, I spent my earlier career as a student in school, suing the school system. Trying and trying to get them to change.

The more unified the system, the better! The more humanist the system, the better! The more LIBERAL the system the better! Asia follows the old 19th century German system which was revolutionary in its day. They produced superb students back then. The American system was based on the local agricultural society which is why summer vacations are a disaster. Way, way, way too long. Tremendously long.

I come from an itellectual family that devours books and in particular, science and other skill books and methodologies so my summers were actually filled with more, not less, learning than the school year. Because we played mathematical games, memory games, strategy games (looooove them!) and in general, did biology and geology and chemistry all summer long, when school started, I would be yet another half a year ahead my contemporaries who had to waste the first two months reviewing all the stuff they stupidly forgot during the summer while I would be chewing my hair, daydreaming or angrily reading some science text in class pointedly ignoring the teacher.

After skipping grades, we made a deal that I could retreat to the library for the first two months each year.

Gads!!! I have demanded the end to summer vacation for years. I won a scholarship to go to school in Europe and it was an eye opener! I was behind everyone! Not way ahead! Behind! Gah!

I caught up by the end of the year, working furiously.

Germany, where I went to school, is collapsing because they don't care anymore. This lack of herzlichen lust is plaguing the entire German culture. America still has a culture even if it is nearly all "drop out-freak out-druggie". Heck, if we didn't have our underclass, our secondary citizens, we would have a fetus culture as the great mass of Americans roll up in a ball and suck thumb.

Asian kids have a longer school year than American. And they have cram classes. And heavy competition. And the parents lean on the kids to learn. All is not well, though. The inhuman side has casualties.

Six young Japanese were found dead from asphyxiation in a car Friday, March 10, apparently the latest victims of a surge in suicide pacts arranged over the Internet.

Authorities said they suspected the five men and a woman, all in their 20s, met online before dying together Thursday night in a forested area 50 miles northwest of Tokyo, the US Seattle Times reported on Saturday, March 11.

Japan has witnessed a rising number of suicide pacts, often arranged on Internet sites. Police reported that 91 people died in online suicides in 2005, up 65 percent from the previous year.

Japan already has the highest suicide rate in the industrialized world, with 24.1 suicides per 100,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization.

Kids are giving up. If you fall even slightly behind, one is left behind forever. Unlike America with its robust street culture that is outside the control of the schools or the government, Japan is conformist and therefore, the only escape for many is death or locking themselves in their rooms.

Chinese students have a feeling of growing opportunity. But Japan, running a tight ship that needs to focus on the uneven/mutually destructive relationship with America, is seeing students give up, wholesale.

In America, we are going blindly, willfully and stupidly in the opposite direction from the winner, Finland. Instead of studying Finland and then ruthlessly altering our messy, EXPENSIVE (I pay high school taxes!) system, we make it worse and worse with a multiplication of school systems and study regimes and fads and...heck! Socialism can work! All it takes is this magic thing called "intelligence."

Once again, the editorial pages of a top newspaper is used to proclaim the utility of being stone stupid. Mr. Cohen's inability to use logic and forethought meant he couldn't learn even simple algebra or even percentages. He is proud of his poverty of mind and thinks this is a great way to think. I explain why it is not a good idea.

The L.A. school district now requires all students to pass a year of algebra and a year of geometry in order to graduate. This is something new for Los Angeles (although 17 states require it) and it is the sort of vaunted education reform that is supposed to close the science and math gap and make the U.S. more competitive. All it seems to do, though, is ruin the lives of countless kids. In L.A., more kids drop out of school on account of algebra than any other subject. I can hardly blame them.

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time -- the only proof I've ever seen of divine intervention -- somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

I was at the top of my class in America, even had spent a summer taking university level courses at Kansas University and I won a scholarship to study in a German Gymnasium. Going to school in Europe was an eye-opener. The yawning chasm between where I was in math and science as well as literature compared to what was required in Europe was nearly a hopeless barrier for me. I had to demand the teachers grade me because they were too embarrassed to let me know how far behind I was. After huge struggles, I managed to begin to catch up only to come back to America and discover I was way ahead of my fellow university students at the freshman level and got permission to take much higher courses.

"Dumbing down" is a slippery slope. After Bush, the dumbest man on earth after Cheney, demanded we have more science, more math, a poll of parents of high school students was done and,57% of parents polled thought we are doing just fine in school and we need no changes. What Mr. Cohen wants are fake diplomas so students can go to college and fail there, too. The WP pays him a lot of money to say irrational or stupid things so I suppose he imagines everyone will be kicked upstairs if only we just ask them to not bother their pretty little heads over trivial stuff like math.

I yell every day about numbers and amounts and point in despair at where graphs are going, how plotting out mathematical forms clearly show danger because we can't ignore the numbers and here we are, fuzzy numbers hiding reality!

The history of the words for counting things and figuring them out, "math" and "reckon" and "number" have a revealing history. Let's start with "math." In ancient Rome, the word for mind was "mens" and indeed, there is a connection between "math" and "mind". You can't do one without the other! In Greek, the word "menos" meant spirit and it is the root of the Greek word for "remember".

The oldest roots of this word are Sanskrit. "Manas" is "mind" and "medha" means "intelligent." This is, in turn, connected with words concerning meadows and hay. A "matha" in Sanskrit means "straw hut" which is where the intellectual would sit and think for this is the name for Hindi monastaries. Note the "monas" here, too!

"Number" comes via the Latin word for "nimble". " Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick," sort of agility. In Old High German, the word mutated into "to take" which I suppose reflected a past history of taking things from Romans, back at the beginning of the Dark Ages? Anyway, going way back to long ago when animals were just beginning to be domesticated on the great plains of Eurasia, the word "nemein" which is the ancestor of word "number" meant "meadow" or "pasture" and "ordering the distribution of various sheep or cows." Those who could count controlled the tally of animals and assigned their proper order in herding them about.

All of which is deeply connected to kinship relationships, religion and dynastic controls.

"Rational" comes from the obvious thing: to divvy up something. It is closely akin, in thought, to "number" in the sense of deciding who gets how many and apportioning land according to various formulae. In Old Frisian, "reathe" means to prove your case in the various Allthings. In Old High German, it means to bring matters to an accounting (note the word "count" here!). In Greek it becomes "arariskein" which means to fit, to shape something, molding it to the body which spawns the word "arms" and "armor". Namely, the rational mind is one that can build a suit of bronze armor and since this is heavy, heavier than steel!--in the bronze age, it had to fit snuggly. I have fought in steel armor and if it is loose or ill fitting, it becomes a great burden but being able to forge and hammer steel, I cunningly shaped each piece to fit snuggly and closely to my limbs and chest so they rode lightly, comparatively speaking.

To do this requires intelligence and care and all the words having to do with calculations and math are words frought with needing intelligence, using the mind, being sane and careful, proper handling of animals and materials, figuring out how to use these jointly.

This is why the inability of our government to function, the inability of businesses to function, we see a nation wide collapse in rationality. The numbers don't add up at all, they are way out of whack and growing worse by the hour and we are told, numbers don't matter, don't project them into the future, don't think! Stop being rational! We are happy with this deadly status quo!

It is like pasturage: the tendency to overgraze, to poison the pastures, is very strong. All of Africa is being turned into desert by out of control herding done by tribes that have no more control over their rational use of the land. Everyone strives to have as many sheep or goats or cattle as possible. And since raiding is now controlled by the states, the herding is out of control since there are no tribes of raiders redistributing the animals, mostly by killing them and selling or eating the parts.

In Medieval Europe, many lawsuits, laws, regulations and directives were passed out by the nobility to control the peasants, what they raised, in what numbers, how to distribute all this. Mostly, the nobles killed each other and the peasantry, it was the simplest solution for untrained minds which simply went bezerk when they gazed upon a neighbor's flock.

But the Church liked percentages and divvying up everything, they were semi-communistic and wanted x amount of y divided by 3, for example, which is where the "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool" nursery rhyme is all about. "One for my lord and one for my dame and one for the little boy down the lane (which was the Church, by the way)". So the Church elevated Mathematics to one of the highest callings and they strove hard to resurrect it from the mess of the Dark Ages where counting consisted of, "One for me and none for you, two for me and, forget it, *whack*." The shifty Venetians, living on very limited lands, sucked up as much math as they could over the years and spent some pretty happy days starting with the Second Crusade, making bad deals with illiterate, unnumbered kings and emperors. They had a hard time trying to not be cheated which takes me back to today.

We are being cheated because we are kept stupid concerning numbers and numbers matter and I wish people would start being rational and take off those shoes and count on the fingers and toes...we are being cheated!

And Cohen should be fired. But then, he is counting on a lifetime paycheck from the Washington Post.

Babies have a rudimentary grasp of maths long before they can walk or talk, according to new research.
By the age of seven months infants have an abstract sense of numbers and are able to match the number of voices they hear with the number of faces they see.

I think we should put some toddlers in Congress. Maybe they can do the budget for us. So long as we outlaw giving them lollypops by lobbyists.